(2) Later, when you watch my troubles begin to mount, you’ll wonder why I didn’t turn to Cheney Phillips, my erstwhile boyfriend, who works for the Santa Teresa Police Department-“erstwhile” meaning “former,” but I’ll get to that in a bit. I did call him eventually, but by then I was already in the soup.

5

I have my office in a little two-room bungalow with a bath and kitchenette, located on a narrow side street in downtown Santa Teresa. It’s in walking distance of the courthouse, but more importantly it’s cheap. My unit is the middle one of three, set in a squat row like the cottages of the Three Little Pigs. The property is perpetually for sale, which means I could be evicted if a buyer comes along.

After Cheney and I broke up, I won’t say I was depressed, but I really didn’t feel like exerting myself. I hadn’t run for weeks. Perhaps “run” is too kind a word, as running is properly defined as six miles an hour. What I do is a slow jog, which is better than a brisk walk, but not by much.

I’m thirty-seven years old and many women I know were whining about weight gain as a side effect of aging, a phenomenon I was hoping to avoid. I had to concede that my eating habits were not what they should have been. I devour a lot of fast food, specifically McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with Cheese, while simultaneously consuming fewer than nine servings of fresh fruits and vegetables daily (actually, fewer than one, unless you want to count the french fries). In the wake of Cheney’s departure, I’d been driving up to the take-out window more often than was good for me. The time had now come to shake off the blues and take myself in hand. I vowed, as I did almost every morning, to start jogging again first thing the next day.

Between phone calls and clerical work, I made it to the noon hour. For lunch, I had a carton of nonfat cottage cheese with a dollop of salsa so fierce it brought tears to my eyes. From the time I removed the lid until I tossed the empty container in the trash, the meal took less than two minutes-twice as long as it took me to consume a QP with Cheese.

At 1:00 I got in my Mustang and drove over to the law firm of Kingman and Ives. Lonnie Kingman is my attorney, who’d also rented me office space after I’d been relieved of the position with California Fidelity Insurance that I’d enjoyed for seven years. I won’t go into the humiliating details of my being fired. Once I was out on the street, Lonnie offered me the use of an empty conference room, providing a temporary haven in which I could lick my wounds and regroup. Thirty-eight months later, I opened an office on my own.

Lonnie was hiring me to serve an Ex Parte Order of Protection on a Perdido man named Vinnie Mohr, whose wife had accused him of stalking, threats, and physical violence. Lonnie thought his hostility might be defused if I delivered the restraining order instead of a uniformed deputy from the county sheriff’s office.

“How dangerous is this guy?”

“Not that bad unless he’s drinking. Then anything can set him off. Do what you can, but if you don’t like the feel of it, we’ll try something else. In an odd way he’s chivalrous…or at any rate, partial to cute girls.”

“I’m neither cute nor girlish, but I appreciate the thought.”

I checked the paperwork, making sure I had the correct address. In the car again, I consulted my Thomas Guide to Santa Teresa and San Luis Obispo Counties Streets, flipping from page to page until I’d pinpointed my destination. I took surface streets to the closest freeway on-ramp and headed south on the 101. There was very little traffic and the drive to Perdido took nineteen minutes instead of the usual twenty-six. There’s no nice reason I can think of to be dragged into court, but by law a defendant in a criminal or civil suit must be given proper notice. I delivered summonses, subpoenas, garnishments, and assorted court orders, preferably by hand, though there were other ways to get the job done-by touch and by refusal being two.

The address I was looking for was on Calcutta Street in midtown Perdido. The house was a sullen-looking green stucco with a sheet of plywood nailed across the picture window in front. In addition to breaking the window, someone (no doubt Vinnie) had kicked a big knee-high hole in the hollow-core front door and then ripped it off its hinges. A series of strategically placed two-by-fours had since been nailed across the frame, rendering the door impossible to use. I knocked and then bent down and peered through the hole, which allowed me to see a man approaching from the other side. He wore jeans and had thin knees. When he leaned toward the hole on his side of the door, all I could see of his face was his stubble-covered cleft chin, his mouth, and a row of crooked bottom teeth. “Yeah?”